This site features a scholarly edition of the text of Henry Machyn's Chronicle:

A London provisioner's chronicle, 1550–1563, by Henry Machyn : manuscript, transcription, and modernization / Richard W. Bailey, Marilyn Miller, and Colette Moore.

When viewing the text found at the link above, select a date to open a portion of the Chronicle. Each entry contains a link to the manuscript image on which that entry begins (e.g., Folio 1r). When viewing a folio image, readers may wish to reduce or enlarge the image by using the "page size" feature at the top of the browser page.

• Simple Search: Single word and phrase searches throughout the entire text.
• Proximity Search: Find the co-occurrence of two or three words or phrases.
• Boolean Search: Find combinations of two or three words in a given entry in the Chronicle.

Other Resources on Henry Machyn

The Chronicle was one of the treasures of the library of the antiquarian Robert Cotton, and it was stored in the same bookcase with the Beowulf manuscript. Its location was in the book press surmounted by a bust of the Roman emperor Vitellius, and it takes its shelf mark in the British Library from that location: Cotton Vitellius F.v. In the terrible fire that did so much damage to this library in the early eighteenth century, the 162 leaves of the diary were badly damaged and portions of the outside margins and the top of the text were charred or burned away. Fortunately extensive selections had been published by the historian John Strype who used the manuscript before the fire, and it is possible to supply many missing portions by consulting his historical works.

The burned pages of the Chronicle were jumbled in a box until the early nineteenth century when one of the librarians at the British Museum had them mounted on framing pieces of paper and sorted into order. In 1848, an antiquarian produced an edition, but even a century ago scholars pointed to its errors and questioned its value for scholarship. Our edition gives a complete inventory of material required by scholars and readers: images of the manuscript, a faithful transcript of those images, and a rendering in modern English of this fascinating document.